HCA: Hermit Crab Association

Hi everyone,

I'm in a situation where I have to move very very suddenly and I want to be able to move my crabs to my new house safely. It's about a 2hr drive from where I currently live. I have two crabs that are pretty active (I see evidence of them eating and moving things around in their tank) but when I'm avaliable I don't normally see them above ground. I have a fairly big tank (75g) and I only have one other person to help me move things to my new house so I want to completely clean out the tank and move the lil guys into a temporary carrier for a few days so that the tank doesn't collapse under weight or anything like that while moving.

My main concern is that my crabs are diggers. I'm 90% sure they're currently not molting (I think they actually just came out of a month and a half long molt!) but they do like hiding away when possible. Does anyone have advice on how to safely dig up my crabs to move them into their temporary enclosure without stressing them out too much? Or any moving advice in general. I plan on setting up the tank as soon as I get to my new area so they aren't in the temporary hut for too long.

Thank you.

Hello!
In the summer of 2021 I had to move my crabs and their 29 gallon tank to a house about 30mins away. My crabs are kept in my attic (it's quite large and has windows), so one struggle was getting the tank up a flight of stairs then up the narrow attic stairway with a tight turn. Here's what I did:
The day of the move, I took everything out of the tank and piled it into boxes. I then began the careful and EXTREMELY nervous task of digging my crabs up as all of them were buried, if not most. I went extremely slowly and as soon as I found a crab, I moved them into a tupperware container that had a bit of sand in it. Looking back, this might not have been the best choice, but the tupperware containers were portable and it did keep them safe.
All the sand was removed and tossed, and the tank, supplies and crabs were put into the car. Once we got home, me and another person moved the tank up into the attic (a hard task, let me tell you). Then, using a home depot bucket, new sand was gradually brought up into the attic. (We bought new bags of sand before the move). The sand was added, the tank reassembled, and crabs put back in.
From this whole experience, only one crab died that summer. However, she was very tiny and I suspect already weak.
I hope this helps some, let me know if you need any clarification or have any other questions!

As stated, go slowly and carefully and prepare to keep the crabs separate just in case anyone has started molting. If you start in a corner and kind of dig in from the side, you have less chance of collapsing a cave than if you start digging from the top down. Then you will of course need to keep an eye on the heat and humidity in the temporary container(s).
To take your substrate with you, dry it out first - this can be quickly acheived by putting a fan on your open tank. The sub will be much lighter to transport dry rather than wet; then you can just re-moisten it when you get to the new location.